Creative practice assessment in an age of AI: a critical response to Simon Paul Atkinson’s “PN25: Assessment: Performance – in the age of AI”

Working discussion paper | 6 November 2026

The point of departure

Simon Paul Atkinson makes an important practical observation: in the performing and media arts, generative AI can produce plausible reflective accounts that are detached from the student’s actual creative activity. His response is to prioritise the performance, anchor written claims to specific moments in the work, and use brief conversations to verify artistic choices. These are defensible assessment strategies. They do not, however, settle the more fundamental question of what creative practice education should assess.

The issue is not principally whether AI enters the creative process. Nor is it simply whether students can authenticate their contribution. It is whether the assessment model operates in the register of competence and retrospective commentary, or in the register of creative capability and the articulation of situated judgement. These different registers imply different accounts of practice, learning and knowledge.

1 | Competence is not capability

Competence describes the satisfactory performance of specified tasks against identifiable standards: operating software, handling a camera, executing a movement, following a procedure. Such skills matter, and some teaching contexts rightly assess them. A dance class may need to establish whether a student can execute a plié. But this is an insufficient organising concept for higher-level creative practice assessment.

Capability concerns what a practitioner can do when the task is not fully specified, the context is unstable, and there is no predetermined correct outcome. It encompasses the capacity to frame and reframe problems; establish the conditions for experimentation and encounter; exercise situated judgement; respond to emerging behaviours; and navigate systems whose outcomes cannot be fully anticipated. Capability is not competence with extra complexity. It names a different educational ambition: agency in conditions of uncertainty.

A technically accomplished outcome may demonstrate competence without showing much creative enquiry. Conversely, an unresolved or unsuccessful artefact may emerge from sophisticated experimentation and significant changes in understanding. Assessment needs to remain open to both possibilities.

2 | From commentary to articulation

Atkinson’s distinction between performance and commentary risks treating practice as an act followed by a report. “Commentary” suggests explanation after the event, perhaps even a retrospective account of demonstrated competencies. The stronger term is articulation: the making explicit of the creative judgements, relationships, conditions and transformations through which an enquiry takes shape.

Articulation can identify how a problem was conceived, what conceptual framework oriented the work, why certain constraints were established, what was selected or abandoned, and how unexpected encounters altered the direction of practice. The decisions are situated: their significance depends on the material, social, aesthetic and conceptual circumstances in which they arose. Consequently, the capacity to articulate authorship is not reducible to fluently defending a finished artefact.

Indeed, articulation may be constitutive of enquiry rather than merely a report upon it. Naming a difficulty, tracing a shift in orientation, or testing a conceptual claim can change the practice itself. Writing and discussion may be sites of creative thinking, not just mechanisms of verification. A five-minute oral defence might offer useful evidence, but it cannot stand as a universal proxy for depth of enquiry.

3 | Practice is more than the visible performance

“The practice is the work” is compelling only if practice is understood expansively. The performed event or finished media artefact is one manifestation of practice, not necessarily the totality of it. Practice also includes problem conception, inquiry design, experimentation, collaboration, judgement, revision and the emergence of new questions. The artwork, the practice and the knowledge produced through practice are related, but not identical.

This is especially important in the media and performing arts, where a creative practitioner may be designing the conditions for an encounter rather than controlling a fixed result. The relevant achievement may lie in orchestrating contingent relationships, responding to unpredictable behaviours or maintaining critical orientation as the work changes. These are capacities, not simply competencies.

Prompting provides a particularly revealing example. A prompt need not be understood merely as an instruction that generates an output. It can be a speculative proposition, a designed constraint, a provocation or an intervention that transforms the space of creative possibilities. Its educational importance lies not only in whether it produces a usable result, but in how it frames an encounter and what the practitioner subsequently learns to ask. This does not require AI integration to become the centre of the argument; it demonstrates why a narrow performance/competence model misses significant aspects of contemporary media arts.

4 | Two fundamentally different assessment logics

The first logic asks how well a response meets an established brief. The second asks how creative engagement has transformed the practitioner’s understanding of the problem, the available possibilities and the grounds for making judgements. Neither model need entirely exclude the other, but they are not interchangeable. Moving from one to the other requires more than substituting an oral conversation for an essay or attaching timecodes to reflection.

5 | Articulation is developmental

The sophistication expected of articulation must vary across levels of study. At earlier undergraduate levels, students may identify and explain creative decisions with reference to their immediate circumstances. At more advanced undergraduate and taught postgraduate levels, they should increasingly situate those decisions within conceptual frameworks, precedents, methods and competing possibilities. At doctoral level, articulation may extend to the epistemological premises of the enquiry and its contribution to knowledge.

This is not a rigid level-by-level taxonomy: disciplines and curricula differ. It is a principle of progression. The ability to justify an artistic choice, critically situate the choice, examine how it changed the problem, and articulate the conditions under which knowledge emerged may differ by orders of sophistication. Assessment should therefore judge the quality of articulation relative to the learning level and the mode of enquiry, rather than treating “can explain choices” as a binary indicator of authentic authorship.

6 | A more ambitious model for creative practice assessment

These are lenses, not five compulsory assessment components. Their balance should follow the purpose and level of the module. A foundational technical class may justifiably place greater weight on demonstrated competence; an experimental creative practice module may privilege enquiry, epistemic agency and articulation. The model also avoids treating an artefact as proof of everything that happened in its making.

7 | From an ontology of being to an ontology of becoming

The deeper difference is ontological. An assessment regime centred on competence tends to treat ability as something already possessed and subsequently demonstrated: the practitioner is measured against a relatively stable description of what they can do. This can be described, in broad terms, as an ontology of being. An enquiry-oriented approach instead takes seriously transformation, emergence and the development of agency through practice: an ontology of becoming.

On this view, the pivotal assessment question is not only “What can this student do?” but also “What has become possible through this enquiry, how has the student’s orientation changed, and how can they articulate that transformation?” This does not exempt practice from critical standards or require every project to demonstrate novelty. It changes what counts as significant evidence of learning.

Conclusion | What is actually at stake?

Atkinson is right to insist that students’ accounts should remain answerable to creative practice. But an account anchored to the work must be more than commentary on a performance or verification of competence. Creative practice assessment should recognise developing capability: the capacity to establish conditions for enquiry, make situated judgements, respond to emergence and transform the understanding of a problem. Articulation makes these processes critically available, and can itself participate in their formation.

The central question is therefore not simply how we establish that students really did the work. It is how assessment can recognise what students become capable of through creative practice, and the increasing sophistication with which they can articulate its decisions, conditions and transformations.

Source under discussion: Simon Paul Atkinson, “PN25: Assessment: Performance – in the age of AI”, LinkedIn article, 6 November 2026. This paper is a conceptual response developed from discussion notes, not a literature review.